This book is a comprehensive biography of Lise Meitner, co-discoverer of nuclear fission. Using a large compilation of Meitner’s personal papers, interviews with her colleagues and friends, and much archival material, Sime recounts Meitner’s life, and suggests injustice in the fact that only Otto Hahn received the Nobel Prize for their joint research. In addition to exploring Meitner’s scientific life, the author also describes her struggle for education and acceptance as a woman, the rise of Nazism, the Holocaust, her unhappy Swedish exile, her refusal to participate in the atomic bomb project, and the postwar German mentality.